


Athene

by aderyn



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: First Time, M/M, Return, Reunions, Ritual, The Adventure of the Empty House, and the missing of war, goddess & god, the giving up of anger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-17
Updated: 2013-05-17
Packaged: 2017-12-12 02:26:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/806085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time, so strange, their mouths with the rough tongues of night-birds, shivering with dew and warming with dawn.  Killers have been there, close by.</p>
<p>In which wisdom and war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Athene

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you, [ PFG](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lizeckhart/works).  
> And to [fennishjournal](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Shimi/pseuds/fennishjournal) for the looks on their faces.

_“Force of reason, who shut up the shrill_

_Foul Furies…” –Amy Clampitt, “Athena”_

 

He’s been in another world for so long. He’s burnt London down in memoriam so many times, skips, windows, walls, roofs, all the old loci.

Made offerings. Looked for pyres and built them. Felt the resinous deaths of pavements and pines.

And people.

Sherlock re-enters his city not as an answer but as a rebirth, trailing behind him the remnants of war.

***

Grief, John has it on authority (though there is none) can be purified in bullets and fire.

Anger maybe another story, or not.

Feathers, perhaps.

Snow.

That’s what Sherlock says to him when he reappears, that where he was last it was cold and full of birds, as though he hopes, faintly, that there might be a flint left in London, a flicker in the heart he left behind.  Or a roost.

***

Well.

He’s nothing if not reverent.

When you call on the gods you shouldn’t expect to be answered.

John said he wanted to live once and then he finally said it again but this time he meant I don’t live without him, not really. 

***

When John gives up his anger, or the brightest spark of it, Sherlock’s glaucous eyes flash gold for a second and he’s reminded of the owl in the church. An owl who couldn’t fly, brought in by wildlife rehab for a demonstration, sitting on a fist like a moving stone.  Birds in a stone church, monuments outside, weeping angels, moss. He and Harry as kids being taught a curtailed wild, a cautious one, birds of prey in church: _be careful; be careful_.  He’s nothing if not reverent. That bird’s eyes tracking the vault _an immensity of hunt._ The wound that might never heal; the longing for flight that would never leave.

Later, winged and dying in the desert, he understood.

***

John, Sherlock says, as though he’s going to explain. He’s feral still, unsure what words will invoke. He manages _hunt with me_ though and they do, because John’s had nothing, since, as breathless as that, as consuming as the trails that no-one else sees, the pair of them following mouse-trace through the dark, scenting the chemistry, miasmatic, in the city’s god- haunts.

***

Owls (John heard in a church) have eyes that were they human-size, would weigh four kilos.

Doors to the dark, Sherlock. Portals to some kind of truth, bellicose and bloody.

Oh make me a shrine then.

I miss it, the war.

***

Sherlock speaks slowly, speaks quickly, tears his nails, crushes Mycroft’s hand, grimaces, glances, touches Lestrade’s arm, kisses Molly, slips a hard arm round Mrs. Hudson. It’s an attitude of not–grace but oh.

His robe’s round him and his city’s round him and he’s wrapped in a crown of sorts, the clever almost-leafing of a sheet.

John shouts at him.

John leaves.

John, head splitting, comes back.

John, when he really sees, is not-afraid in the way, well, what would you do if what you, well, prayed for, actually appeared, wild-eyed and fierce and trailing war.

You’d draw closer.

***

He’s nothing if not reverent. Oh, humans have fucked it all up, haven’t they, trying to pin labels on divinity, trying to keep the bird in the temple; jesus, he’s never been so … they’re inside each other already; oh, it isn’t a stretch to think that for all this time he’s been waiting not to find out who he is but who he … well, it doesn’t matter. He’s never lied to himself, not really. He just didn’t expect to fall out of one life and lift off so spaciously into another. 

Twice.

***

He notices things now, like that Sherlock says his name in a tone he never uses for anyone else. No matter how … there’s well, there _is_ an attitude of prayer in it. A wonder at having found. A wonder at having been answered, at being answered, repeatedly, again and again until their faces can’t grow any younger or any older or any more timeless.

Sherlock is an ancient life barely recalled, hemlock and smoke and white doves, a new life purified in fire, blackened by soot, sap, resin, pines on a hillside and _where have you been_. Feather and snow.  A cut throat. A weaving of murder and joy.

***

It took 1.7 seconds of chaos, at the beginning, for Sherlock to know that he’d never, if he was ever going to, be with anyone else.  Bodies are yes-- dead, living, locked together, suspended, touching, not. Transport. Ships. Shipwrecks.  But still. It isn’t the last time or the first; it isn’t but here it is. Well. I called you and you came and finally. I waged a war for you and now.

I’m home.

***

John climbs the stairs too solid and Sherlock greets him with a grip that sublimates, turns him round, turns round himself. It’s not far to the elements, the table, the bed, not far to take a finger to an eyebrow, a lip.  Sherlock is hot in some places and cold in others, as if part of him wants to get up a fever, another to sink well-deep and not come out.  And doesn’t that just catch it, just there, what it’s like the first time John takes a hand, pulls it along the smoke-slip of Sherlock’s hair in a new way; not the tending, the parting for thread, not the testing and sparring and offering and grappling but something else entirely--keratin, eumelanin, iron and ash, the litanies he'd speak in each softness, and the hard wonder.

The first time, so strange, their mouths with the rough tongues of night-birds, shivering with dew and warming with dawn.  Killers have been there, close by.  Everything they’ve ever fought and touched. Criminal.

Sherlock takes his wrists, his forearms, his hips.

Alright, John says. Because how can one be.

I don’t, says John, and there isn’t one thing he’s stopping for except, well, he wouldn’t be human if ...

“Not sure about you,” he says, smiles, but Sherlock _might be,_ human and true when John opens him as he’s never done, when John speaks a strange word which must be his name and pulls Sherlock’s hands over around between in so they can be inside each other as they’ve always been.

Afterwards, crepuscular; the mingling of hair, a variegation. John, eyes to the ceiling to the sky; Sherlock's arm over his raked shoulder, hand dropped like a claw over his cheek-brushed skull.

That bird, longing--not to escape but to partner with the night, to lift and light into it wondering and wise.

 

**Author's Note:**

> [Amy Clampitt, “Athena”](http://books.google.com/books?id=plPqF3hbcXkC&pg=PT276&lpg=PT276&dq=%22athena%22+amy+clampitt&source=bl&ots=5r_hXmoEo7&sig=DZgxaX3tWq-IRKYgvTCJWPxA-0c&hl=en&sa=X&ei=GF6VUYSABaLv0gGC6YEw&ved=0CEkQ6AEwBA).
> 
>  [British owls](http://www.wildowl.co.uk/britishowls.html)  
> [ British Wildlife Rehabilitation Council](http://bwrc.org.uk/#)  
> [Athena Glaukopis](http://thepoweroftheeyesinancientgreece.blogspot.com/2011/12/what-is-glaukopis.html)  
> [Glaucous (gorgeous)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glaucous)


End file.
